[Prizm 2011 Contest Entry] PrizmCity

[Ashbad]

So, I decided to finalize my choice for what I would do in the Prizm contest I was going to do pyyrix, but 30% a nasty bug hit and since I couldn't release the source (I would have to show at least 60% of it for someone to make sense of it) and after I realized I couldn't get it done in time, I decided last week to start another attempt: PrizmCity!

A full color SimCity1-like game where you are the mayor of a region and must build a city from scratch (like in SimCity, obviously ).  As with SimCity games, you can't build your own buildings (besides schools, police kiosks, landmarks/parks, etc.) but instead you zone them out into Residental, Industrial, and Commercial areas so that private builder will build in these areas.  

The wealth of the buildings and residents entirely depends on how you plan you city though: you need to keep crime low, education and health high, environment pristine, utilities in check, transportation appropriate in certain city areas (low traffic in industrial and residential, high traffic in commercial), tourist attraction to bring business and wealth, and good laws/taxes/ordinances that aren't too strict yet still earn you money.

I should gave everything I just said ^above^ done by the contest due date (hopefully), and maybe afterwords I'll put in things like countries of joined regions, multiplayer region trading, disasters, designing custom terrain you city will be built on, and more.

Some screens (the in-game ones will probably be shown tomorrow):





(in case you didn't know, both backgrounds are of the Parque Central Twin Towers in Caracas, Venezuela I thought they showed a "city aura" well so I picked them for the job)

Also, this might possibly be the first thread out there for a Prizm contest entry and, in the about screen, it *says* open-sourced, and it will be open-sourced once the contest due date has passed (I can distribute it then)

[AngelFish]

Holy... 

Those graphics are amazing

[DJ Omnimaga]

indeed! I hope you finish it though. That said nice job on the layout Ashy. Did you make the second screenshot graphics all yourself btw?

Sorry to hear about the Pyrix bug, though

[yunhua98]

Th graphics are real pics. 

that said, it looks really nice. 

[Juju]

Sounds pretty promising. Don't forget the Prizm only have 65536 colors, you might want to downgrade these pics to 16 bit so it would be more realistic.

[Ashbad]

Sounds pretty promising. Don't forget the Prizm only have 65536 colors, you might want to downgrade these pics to 16 bit so it would be more realistic.

Actually, now that I have the menu fully working (title screen, cursor, about screen) I must remark you can barely tell the difference between the 24 bit versions and 16 bit versions I could only tell that one cloud looked blurrier.  But to the sane person, it looks *amazing* even with only 2^16 colors

With that being said, yes I do have the main title screen elements working, and rather smoothly too.  I messed with Kerm's PRGM_GetKey routine and was able to make sure that pressing keys won't go through the cursor options too fast or anything; in short, I have found a way to have Axe-Like GetKey responsiveness, whoever thought they went Casio BASIC speed was rather wrong (wrong about the custom GetKey routine that scans the buffer)

Got that done, and I already had some of the actual engine done (map generation) -- this is going very very well.  Expect a very polished release on the due date.  I went through 3 hours of coding just now to make a large set of custom Axe-Like routines, the Title Screen, and bug fixing tile generation so I'd say I'm moving rather fast.  I should have some actual gameplay progress by sunday or labor day; tomorrow will be spent doing some of the spriting (probably roads, utilities, some more terrain objects, and zoning overlays)

[AngelFish]

Perhaps I should mention that I've been wanting a civilization type program for about the past three days. What a coincidence...

[Ashbad]

Perhaps I should mention that I've been wanting a civilization type program for about the past three days. What a coincidence...

excellent!  Just 14 more days!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah the difference between 16 and 24 is hard to perceive with such pic. Heck you could even downgrade to 8 bits if you have a compression routine and save some space and it would probably not look too bad. On  a side note can Paint convert to 16 bits color?

I'M glad some coding is done too. Also for Getkey I was actually confused the other day because Eiyeron seemed to have tried one routine after another and all seemed to run at BASIC speed. That scared the hell out of me, but finally it turned out he meant only one of the routines.

Good luck Ashy!

[Ashbad]

Thanks ATM I'm crazily working on it right now.  I actually almost even have the structure done for the entire city (50x50 60x60 cells, since each cell is a *highly condensed* structure that is ATM up to 15 14 (found an optimization to stack a certain attribute better) bytes big each -- I'm using a shitload of unions and non-limited enums to (even custom bit-width ints) to conserve every *bit* of every cell.  Each bit is crucial and used very well)

^ hehe, t'was updating code while I wrote this

With the structure for the city done, I just need to plug it into my rudimentary lathe Save/Load thing and you can keep your progress safe in a single file though only one city at a time, since I'm not going to be able to have a whole searching-for-city-files thing done in time for the due date I'm sure.

Map generation is done, but needs to be polished.  I still need to make sprites/tiles.  And then the fun parts begin ^_^

EDIT: DJ, paint actually can't convert, but mkg3a and SourceCoder 2.5 can SC2.5 only accepts files up to 100MB, and the titlescreen/about screen were compressed many times in .png format and still were slightly too big; I actually had to process them in chunks

[DJ Omnimaga]

You forgot to make backups.

But nice to hear and I'M glad mkg3a and SourceCoder can. Also 100MB? Shouldn't that be more than enough for any pic? 100 MB is like 100000x10000 bmp I think!

Also by map generation do you mean maps are kinda randomized?

[Ashbad]

Oh yeah I meant 100KB

Yeah maps are somewhat randomized, not that much, but they are

Also, what do you mean about backups I haven't lost any progress thus far and either way I still have it backed up

[DJ Omnimaga]

Ah I see, and I was kidding about backups. I was saying because I know some people still lose entire progress due to fried hard drives

[Ashbad]

Ah I see, and I was kidding about backups. I was saying because I know some people still lose entire progress due to fried hard drives

I think I'm one of the few people who have never (accidentally) lost progress with a RAM clear / HardDrive Error

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah but it can actually happen to anyone. After all Calc84maniac said the same thing as you before I'm sure, then one day it happened. As of now I guess it's fine though. I just mean it would suck if on Sept 15th at 8 PM you suddenly lost everything you worked on plus about 700 GB of your questionable videos/images